Polls show a majority of Americans now believe AI will do more harm than good, an 11-point jump in one year. This negative sentiment is growing despite, and perhaps because of, rising adoption. The paradox is that increased AI fluency correlates with decreased optimism, particularly about the job market.

Americans see AI not as a tool for progress, but as the ultimate weapon for a new corporate ethos where profits surge *because* of layoffs and offshoring. This breaks the historical assumption that company success benefits employees, making workers view AI as an existential threat.

October saw the highest number of U.S. job cuts in two decades, with consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas explicitly citing AI adoption as a key driver. This data confirms that AI's impact on employment is an ongoing event, moving beyond speculation into measurable, significant job displacement.

Leaders from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are openly and consistently predicting profound disruption to the labor market from AI. This view, once an outlier, has become the conventional wisdom in the tech C-suite, signaling a major shift in expectations for the near-term future of work.

A new survey shows 71% of workers expect net job loss from AI in the next three years. However, only 21% are seriously concerned about their own job, revealing a widespread cognitive bias where professionals see the risk to the market but not to themselves personally.

In a survey of the podcast's tech-savvy audience, an overwhelming 94% reported that a recent experience with AI made them rethink the value of a skill they've built over their career, indicating a present-day impact on knowledge workers.

While proclaiming AI will create jobs, tech giants like Google and Meta have seen profits soar while their employee counts have fallen from 2022 peaks. This data from AI's biggest adopters provides concrete evidence that fuels public skepticism and fears of widespread, technology-driven job losses.

Current anxiety about AI-driven job losses stems from a few high-profile announcements. These early examples are being extrapolated into doomsday scenarios, even though comprehensive data on the net effect is not yet available, feeding our collective imagination and fear.

In a sobering essay, the CEO of leading AI lab Anthropic has offered a concrete, near-term economic prediction. He forecasts massive job disruption for knowledge workers, moving beyond abstract existential risks to a specific warning about the immediate future of work.